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The African Heritage in Peru and Argentina is Celebrated at 2023 Multicultural Music Encounters PAGE 2 Pete Miranda Receives Tribute at Event Organized by Fellow Musician Pete Nater
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2023 Multicultural Music Encounters
Celebrate African Heritage in Peru and Argentina
The Multicultural Music Group (MMG) celebrated the 2023 Multicultural Music Encounters on June 9 and 16 at the Lovinger Theater, Lehman College, CUNY.
The Multicultural Music Encounters (MME) have been a success in the development of new symphonic repertoire with a multicultural focus and the support of cultural awareness in NYC communities. As part of our annual series, MMG commissions and features composers from different cultures to write a symphonic piece representing their identity and history.
This year, the MMG commissioned Yuri Juárez, who used his experience as an Afro-Peruvian composer to gather a history of Black culture in his home country. Juárez is a guitarist, arranger, and composer who began his career in 1996 as a guitarist for various Afro-Peruvian music, folk, and fusion groups. His musical training ranges from formal studies at New York University with Gil Goldstein, John Scofield, and Peter Bernstein and also with the Peruvian masters of the guitar such as Pepe Torres, Alvaro Lagos, Jorge Madueño and more “street” experience in Afro-Peruvian peñas. He has shared the stage and recorded with musicians like Susana Baca, Arturo and iconic Peruvian composers such as Kiri Escobar and Javier Lazo, and trail-blazing bands, including the Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet, Novalima, and Tangolandó among others.
During the event, attendees enjoyed a brief documentary about the history of Afro-Peruvian culture, which was gathered in the form of an academic conversation between Juárez, activist, artist, and scholar Mónica Carrillo, and professor Tania Aparicio. Carrillo is an AfroPeruvian writer, performer, and human rights advocate, founder and former director of LUNDU Center for Afro-Peruvian Studies and Advancement. In the artistic world, Carrillo goes by the name “Oru.” She creates poetry that mixes Afro-beat, hip-hop, and Afro-Peruvian music to bring attention to the ongoing effects of racism and sexism. For her part, Aparicio is an interdisciplinary sociologist, art practitioner, and video maker. As a qualitative sociologist, she studies the production of art and culture and how different forms of inequality are experienced in organizational settings, with particular attention to class, gender, and ethnoracial relations.
The proceedings of the very intriguing conversation can be found here.
On June 16, attendees enjoyed the compositional talent of Latin Grammy winner Pedro Giraudo, whose piece "Sin palabras/Speechless" focused on the power of silence around Argentine blackness and how to overcome it through education, music, and research.
In the same fashion as during the first concert, participants saw a documentary in the form of a conversation between Professor Paulina Alberto (Harvard University) and Giraudo.
Paulina L. Alberto is a historian of Afro-Latin American lives, thought, and politics as they unfolded in the aftermath of slavery, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. Her work explores the intersections of ideas of race and nation in Latin America, with a focus on how Afro-Latin Americans have shaped and contested the region's ideologies of racial inclusiveness in their ongoing struggles for recognition and equality. Alberto’s latest single-authored work is Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Black Legend reconstructs both the life story of and the legends surrounding Raúl Grigera, a Black celebrity and icon of the Buenos Aires nightlife in the early 1900s.
For his part, Giraudo is a Latin Grammy Award winner bassist and composer who is among the most compelling tango artists today. After two decades of performing with the most important interpreters of tango, he debuted his own Tango Orchestra in July 2015 and since then has become an active cultural ambassador of this beautiful and passionate music of his native Argentina In 2018, his album "Vigor Tanguero" won a Latin GRAMMY award for ‘Best Tango Album’.
The conversation can be accessed here.
